Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Thanks Yucata for adding Macao

I don’t know how long it’s been since I last played Macao before it got added to Yucata. Four or five years at least but I’ve considered it one of my favorite Felds I’ve played. Getting back into it on Yucata has only confirmed it.

Macao is the one with the wind rose. It easily falls under the description of point salad but you can believably get away with describing it as a pick-up-and-deliver game driven by resource management.

I’m not going to go through the rules but I kind of have to talk about the wind rose. It’s really a seven space clock that you fill with cubes. Every turn, a die for each of the six colors of cube gets rolled. You choose two dice and put that number of cubes on that number on your clock. Each turn, the clock ticks one space and those are the cubes you have to work with that turn.

Macao is not the first game that requires you to plan ahead or even program your moves ahead (indeed, compared to a lot of programmed movement games, Macao gives you a lot of latitude) but it’s still a pretty original way of doing it. And all the elements of the game tie together pretty well. The core of the game is simple but it gives you lots of choices.

While I was already a fan of Notre Dame, Macao was the game where I started really paying attention to Feld. I have not been able to remotely keep up with his output but Macao is one game I’m glad I’ve experienced.